TV & Radio Friday December 23

Community has a deeply personal, stop-motion animated Christmas. With pterodactyls. Also, Doctor Who is on Graham's couch.

TV

Community

The X Factor (TV3, 7.30pm). The final!

Community (Four, 8.00pm). Community’s Christmas special involves singing and stop-motion animation; it’s a loose homage to The Polar Express and stop-motion specials such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It focuses on Abed, and his quest, with stop-motion versions of the group, for the meaning of Christmas. It got good reviews in the US, with HuffPost reviewer Maggie Furlong saying it was “as touching and poignant as this show has ever been”. The AV Club liked it too.

The Graham Norton Show (TV3, 9.30pm). On Graham’s couch are Kenneth Branagh (who plays Olivier in My Week with Marilyn); boxing champ Amir Khan; comic Russell Kane; and Matt Smith (Doctor Who).

FILM

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Toy Story 2 (TV2, 5.00pm). About as near-perfect as a sequel can be, introducing new characters that legitimately occupy the Toy Story world and taking advantage of the exponential improvements in CGI that followed the first movie. Incredibly, Toy Story 2 gives Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) a backstory, as well as raising poignant issues of whether toys should be locked away and not played with, and what happens to toys when their owners grow up. All that, plus a nail-biting adventure when the rest of the toys set out to rescue a kidnapped Woody. (1999) 10

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (TV2, 7.30pm). Four kids, an exiled prince and a heroic mouse: this is a darker tale than part one in the series, but in the scenes shot here before filming was completed in the Czech Republic, New Zealand never looked more photogenic. And CGI never looked slicker or more realistic, but it’s scary in parts, so pack the smaller tots off to bed. (2008) 7 – Diana Balham

Phone Booth (Four, 8.30pm). A sleazy publicist gets trapped in a phone booth by a sniper who says he’ll kill him if he hangs up. Oh well, we don’t have to worry about this sort of thing happening any more. Just try finding a phone booth. Screenwriter Larry Cohen had been kicking this old-school idea around since the 1960s, when he tried to get Alfred Hitchcock interested, but they couldn’t work out a plot reason to keep the victim in the booth. It took Cohen until the late 90s to think of using a sniper – and he wrote the script in less than a month! So, Colin Farrell is the guy and Kiefer Sutherland is the gunman, with Forest Whitaker, Katie Holmes and Radha Mitchell on the periphery. Farrell’s considerable energy makes this more tense and watchable than you would imagine. (2002) 7 – Diana Balham

RADIO

Nine to noon with Kathryn Ryan (Radio New Zealand National, 9.06am). Kathryn Ryan wraps up the year with a discussion about the highlights and lowlights of 2011; a chat with Roger Highfield, the author of The Physics of Christmas; a chat to Hedda Bolgar, the 102-year-old recipient of an Outstanding Older Worker Award in the US; Levi Hawken, who coined the “nek minnit” term; an interview with Roger Sutton; best Christmas music with Chris Bourke; Nota Bene sing carols; and a chat with a couple in Canberra who set the world record for most Christmas lights on a residential property. Info and audio here.

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